BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. Google, the world's most popular internet search engine, was devised during its developers’ early attempts to digitize libraries. With the search business booming, Google has returned to its roots in an ambitious endeavor to digitize the world's books. The project, called Google Print, is beginning with the collections of four colleges and the New York Public Library, but Google is not stopping there, which is raising some eyebrows internationally. Leading the chorus of anxiety, predictably enough, was the president of the National Library of France, who fears a super search engine of the world's books controlled by an American company will inevitably exacerbate American cultural imperialism. Jean Noel Jeanneney's concerns prompted the European Commission to fund its own European digital library, and he joins us now from Paris. Jean Noel, welcome to the show.

JEAN NOEL JEANNENEY: Thank you for welcoming me.

BOB GARFIELD: When did you first learn of Google's plans, and what, what was your immediate reaction?

JEAN NOEL JEANNENEY: Well, reaction was satisfaction. It was obvious for me that it was one important step in the direction of what we all dream of, which is the possibility to give to a world audience access to huge parts of human culture.

BOB GARFIELD: But you clearly are no longer quite as sanguine about the plans. What is your principal objection?

JEAN NOEL JEANNENEY: You must understand – I have nothing against it. I think Google is quite a precious invention, and we all use Google. But I think you in America know very well how dangerous it could be to have only this private-owned and American searching engine dominating all over the world. You are the country who has invented the Sherman Act against monopoly.

BOB GARFIELD: How does the storage of book pages – pages that ultimately will be accessible to anyone in Europe and elsewhere, how does that threaten France?

JEAN NOEL JEANNENEY: It's a question of hierarchy. It's a question of page ranking. We believe that it will be quite normal to expect American libraries to organize that page ranking in a way which would be, of course, influenced by the American civilization. I didn't want this American mirror to be proposed all over the world to all the peoples. I wanted them to be able to choose and to make their own opinion, forgetting to – the different possibilities of the cultural look to, to the – our history and our actuality.

BOB GARFIELD: You're just suggesting that the tendency of Americans to look at American works will automatically relegate French authors and other non-American authors to a lower page rank, and thus become a kind of perpetual motion machine for over-emphasizing works most interesting to Americans.

JEAN NOEL JEANNENEY: As you know, Google's algorithm is mysterious. We do not know it. It's a kind of industrial secret, like the way you create Coca-Cola. But what is clear, as far as normal Google is concerned, is that there is a tendency to go to sites which are already well-known.

BOB GARFIELD: Isn't it possible that the Google technology will actually be a force to defeat American cultural imperialism, because it will reflect the usage patterns of people worldwide?

JEAN NOEL JEANNENEY: I know that the motto of Google is the ambition to "organize the information of the world." When you say you organize, you are not only a passive mirror. Google is bound to propose things as a kind of an enormous dictionary, with a coagulation of facts, facts and facts. Of course if you want to know what Lincoln said, you will probably find it easily. But if you want to think on the question of relationship between democracy and capitalism, for instance, then you need to have a thread; you need to be helped. You need to have an organized corpus. We don't want to have only bits of information, but to propose our own organization of the culture of the world. For instance, we have created and maintained the French cinema. We don't want to have dumping, to invade our screen, so we have protected ourselves. In the field of internet, it's not possible to have a defensive attitude, but it's possible to have an offensive attitude. I mean to go on and digitize ourselves and the whole world will be richer because of that type of competition.

BOB GARFIELD: Very well. Well, Jean Noel, thank you so much.

JEAN NOEL JEANNENEY: Well, thank you very much.

BOB GARFIELD: Jean Noel Jeanneney is president of the National Library of France. Susan Wojcicki is Google's director of product management, and she's spearheading Google Print. She says there is no most favored nations status when it comes to Google searches, so the nations of Europe have nothing to fear.

SUSAN WOJCICKI: We have a technology called Page Rank, and what Page Rank does is the page looks to see who links to that page, and so if a lot of pages have linked to a specific page, then we count that like a vote. It's a very democratic way of trying to understand what is important to our users, and so it's not Google coming in saying these are the most important pages. It's actually what the web has selected to be the important works. So different languages or different collections will link to their own material that they see most relevant for them, and so the net result is whatever is most relevant for an English-speaking audience would come up to the top, as opposed to whatever is most relevant for a French-speaking audience.

BOB GARFIELD: But is the use of Google so heavily influenced by American users and linkers at this stage as to defeat, at least in the beginning, the ultimate promise of Google's evenhandedness?

SUSAN WOJCICKI: Over 50 percent of Google's traffic is non-English traffic. And so, if Google were to do something in some way bias the results to be more English or more American, and that wasn't the right thing for our users, we would expect our users to go somewhere else to do their searches. In order to remain competitive, from a business standpoint, it makes sense for us to offer the right results to the users, regardless of what country or language they're in.

BOB GARFIELD: Google, the search engine, sustains itself by selling placements on search result pages to advertisers who have paid for their messages to come up based on certain key words.

SUSAN WOJCICKI: Uh-huh.

BOB GARFIELD: What is the business model for Google and the books of the world?

SUSAN WOJCICKI: The business model for Google Print is exactly the same as our business model for our main search, and the goal of the program as well is that you're able to come to Google, you're able to type in any word, and we are able to present books that would be relevant to your search, and when you actually go to that book, and click on it, you can either find a library where you can find it, or you can actually find where you could purchase that book. And we would show advertising on the right hand side, just like we're doing today.

BOB GARFIELD: On the subject of business, I think one of the things that makes the French queasy is that so many pages from so many works from so many libraries around the world will be, in effect, owned – at least the, the digital images – will be owned by a for-profit American company.

SUSAN WOJCICKI: Our focus and our passion is on making information available that otherwise would have been unavailable. I think what Google can bring to the table that will be valuable is Google can do this at scale. So no one has been able to digitize an entire collection. No one has been able to digitize in the Harvard volume range of 14 million volumes. We're bearing significant financial costs to do this, and we believe that it's the right thing for our users and for our search and for seekers of knowledge, so if there really is real concern about one company doing this, then I would expect that the market forces would come into play, and there would be another provider who would step in and do this.

BOB GARFIELD: Okay. Well, Susan, thanks very much.

SUSAN WOJCICKI: Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: Susan Wojcicki is Google's director of product management. She's spearheading Google Print, which is digitizing the libraries of the world.